The Iranian theocracy has been the world’s biggest embassy attacker for the past half century.
Therefore, there is zero credibility in accusing Israel of the April 1 attack on its “consulate general” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s main terrorist group, the Revolutionary Guards there.
Recall that the Ayatollah of Iran was first introduced to the world in 1980 with the violent takeover of the US embassy in Tehran.
Iranian proxies then bombed the American embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
In fact, Iran has been attacking US and Israeli diplomatic posts intermittently for decades, most recently in 2023 when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.
For this reason and several others, Iran justified sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel because Israel bombed Iranian diplomatic missions abroad. is completely ridiculous.
The first is that Iran has never respected diplomatic immunity. Instead, it routinely attacks and kills embassy staff and bombs diplomatic facilities around the world.
Second, on April 1, Israelis attacked a fake “consulate” in Damascus that was hosting large Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders who were planning terrorist attacks on Israel.
Without Iran, the Middle East would have the opportunity to use its vast oil and gas wealth to lift half a billion people out of poverty, rather than being mired in a constant tribal and religious quagmire of anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western Europe. It might have been. terrorism.
During the Iraq War, hundreds of Americans were killed by Iranian Shiite terrorists and their massive supply of deadly exotic explosives. It regularly hijacks container ships in the Strait of Hormuz, almost colliding with American ships and aircraft.
How will Iran escape persistent anti-Western terrorism, constant harassment of maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf, efforts to overthrow moderate Sunni governments, and serial hostage situations?
Priesthood holders act on three general principles.
First, Iran is careful not to attack major powers directly.
Until this week, it had never sent missiles or drones into Israel. Its economy is entirely dependent on oil exports. And paranoid governments mistrust their own citizens, who lack access to free elections.
So Iran’s strategy over the past few decades has been to assign the dirty work of killing Israelis and Americans to proxies, especially disposable Arab Shiite terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen and Sunni Arabs in Hamas. I’ve been dependent on it.
The government loudly egged them all on, cowardly denying responsibility for fear of Israeli or American retaliation.
Second, by pretending to be a persecuted victim, they have deceived Western governments, especially left-wing governments in the United States. Iran claims to be the defender of the beleaguered Shiite Arab and Persian minorities that are unfairly exploited by Israel, moderate Arab governments, and wealthy Sunni Gulf monarchies.
Third, Iran uses a combination of pseudo-diplomatic outreach to left-wing Western governments and a combination of insane existential threats and terrorist attacks against its enemies to placate and bully Western powers into granting concessions. We hope to be able to do that — especially at a time when we are acquiring more than a dozen nuclear weapons.
But despite its loud and ominous threats, Iran is incredibly weak and vulnerable.
Israel and its allies have shot down nearly all recent nocturnal missile and drone barrages. A number of other missiles reportedly exploded during takeoff in Iran or crashed during transit.
Before Biden’s Iran appeasement, the Trump administration isolated Iran and its proxies, pushing them to the brink of bankruptcy. Revolutionary Guard terrorist plotters proved easy targets once they operated outside Iran.
Iran’s only hope is to acquire a bomb and a nuclear deterrent to prevent it from retaliating if it escalates terrorist proxy attacks against Israel, the West, and international commerce.
But now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking mainland Israel for the first time. He is finding that he has few sympathetic allies.
Does even Lebanon’s Hezbollah really want to take revenge on Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see the Shiite areas of Lebanon reduced to rubble?
Do the pro-Hamas protesters on American campuses and streets really want to show the American public that they are celebrating an attack on Iran and the possibility of Iranian war with the United States?
Does Iran really believe that 99 percent of future Israeli barrages against Iranian targets will not hit their targets in the same way that their own recent launches have failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel deserves amnesty – as if it should be forgiven for trying and failing to kill thousands of Jews? .
In short, by provoking a war on terror in the Middle East and targeting mainland Israel, Iran may soon wake up and Israel or America, or both, may retaliate for half a century of terrorist attacks. Even the joy of most people around the world.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow at the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of Basic Books’ The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. You can get in touch by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
